Tuesday, May 27, 2008

I Decided That This Was a Weird Moral Decision to Make Anyway

My story as a working girl is an ongoing one, and somewhat less than textbook, though, to be honest, I have no idea what the textbook case is.

About me: I am nineteen years old, good-looking, with a great figure, enough to do modelling now and again when I feel like it. Guys buy my drinks, drive me home and light my cigarettes. So why oh why, you might wonder, did a girl like me turn to being an escort?

The reason is simple: money. I have a student loan and an overdraft to pay off, along with rather large phone bills (what being a sociable person gets you), and a miserable part-time job in a bar that has, up until now, paid minimum wage. Full-time work is near impossible to find, and there is no way that I can drink, smoke and get around on sixty a week; the taxi home from work costs ten alone. I know that might contradict the previous paragraph, but I do like to be independent sometimes.

Another thing is that since becoming sexually active, I have become somewhat cynical of men and their motives. I’m good in bed, I instinctively know what to do and how to do it, and men love it. And after being used in the past, I have decided that I’m going to use them as well; might as well get something out of it, rather than waiting for the phone to ring!

As well as that, I do not see prostitution as a stigma, like some people do. I have always been for the legalisation of the profession; after all, it is jokingly referred to as ‘the oldest job in the world’, and every joke has a grain of truth to it. If it has existed for so long, wagging your finger at it is not going to make it go away all of a sudden. And what is so bad about it? Why has having casual sex become acceptable, yet charging for it is not? And why consistently put women in danger of mugging, sexually transmitted infections and bodily harm for doing nothing but using their body to earn money? There are far worse ways, like robbery, or conning a charity. And what about trafficking?

But I digress; I am not here to debate the legalisation or to tell you all about the dangers that working girls go through; I am sure you must have heard about it at some point. Moving on to yours truly, I am a fully fledged Internet addict (not much else to do all week), so I registered on a website that is an adult version of personal ads sites, where people register and look for people to have sex with. My profile looks for someone ‘generous’ and ‘non-judgemental’ to ‘help me pay off my overdraft’, and I have no face photos on there – after all, I do know a lot of people, and being seen on there soliciting would do me no good.

I also posted an ad on Craigslist, which is slightly more problematic, because as opposed to being click on the sender and being taken to their profile detailing their location, interests, photos etc, I have to ask people for this before I begin sending photos.

Within days, I’ve had numerous interest from both sites, from old men and guys that were married to their jobs, and guys that wanted webcam fun (no way in hell), and weirdos, and guys whose fantasy was to pay a girl for sex. I spent some time oscillating between telling myself I couldn’t afford to be picky and if they were paying for it then there was no reason to discriminate, and feeling disgusted at the thought of sleeping with some of them. In the end I decided that this was a weird moral decision to make anyway and there was no reason to begin to hate myself in the process by having sex with people that made my skin crawl.

I’ve never done this sort of thing before, so I didn’t really know how to go about the whole safety thing, but I used common sense, suggesting hotels and using my intuition – a useful tool that many women ignore, and better to be safe than sorry! Prices-wise, I looked at the guy and asked for either a hundred, hundred and fifty or two hundred, without a set timeframe though. Most of them wanted to go for a drink or two before the ‘main event’, which was fine by me, as I am generally quite an aloof and standoffish person, and need alcohol to warm up. One person moaned about a hundred and suggested sixty, to which I replied that a) I was not a street walker and b) I did not make deals or negotiate. Others had no problem with two hundred and paying for the hotel.

The only difficult thing for me is to be nice to people who are genuinely stupid, through no fault of their own, just a lack of brain cells, and to be forthcoming to guys in general. My general stance is to be slightly sceptical of them, to be sarcastic and to make them feel slightly insecure; here, I have to laugh at their lame jokes and pretend to find them adorable because I feel like I have to. It’s hard to explain but I guess the basic idea is that I don’t suck up to men, ever, and now I have to be nice to them. It’s a novel way to behave for me!

My first john was a guy called S, that looked a bit stupid but not particularly ugly in his photo; he was from the personals website. He was fine with a hundred and fifty. We arranged to meet in a car park, and I was about half an hour late because I was staying at the house of the guy I was seeing – shock horror, how unprofessional! I know I mentioned staying in a hotel and letting people know where I was, but who could know where I was? Besides, I knew the town I was going to well and could make my way to the train station if anything happened.

We went back to his and had a few drinks (me, as he had to drive), chatted about things and then there was that awkward moment where he clearly wanted to move things on but didn’t want to throw me on the bed and I was at the “oh my god, what am I doing?” stage, but we moved on. The sex was fine, he clearly loved it (the words ‘incredible’ etc featured a lot) and I wasn’t really complaining. He went to take money out of his bank account (should have asked for it up front, I know) and it wouldn’t come out, so he gave me his iPod as something to keep until he got it, and indeed I did get it a few days later.

Now he wants to take me to dinner before going back to his, and I’m thinking, isn’t this not what men do with call girls? It seems a bit formal, and not my thing, and to be honest I don’t want anything to do with him other than getting paid – not because he paid for it the first time round, but because we have nothing in common and he doesn’t particularly entice me as a person.

I’m seeing a guy right now that doesn’t know about this side of my life, and I’m not going to tell him. I want to discuss things with him soon – if he wants a relationship, then I will stop this immediately and try to pay off my overdraft the ‘honest’ way, and if he doesn’t then I will carry on. That way, I have a backup either way…

LEGAL

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